So... this seems like a good time to start experimenting with Mastodon.
I'm very skeptical about the chances of getting enough network effect to bootstrap a new social media site in general, and even more for distributed/decentralized/non-commercial ones.
Still, recent events on Twitter make me believe there is a chance, and I'd like to help make that happen.
@pwuille I think the big problem we're going to see is that Mastodon has much worse protections against spam than Twitter does. That's not a problem yet. But it will be in the future. And dealing with it could destroy the ability of small instances like mine to federate with others.
If email didn't have big companies like Google pouring money into anti-spam, it'd probably be dead already.
Bitcoin can fix this by making spam costly. But the people behind Mastodon hate crypto currencies.
@midnightmagic @pwuille What kind of cleaner solution? Spam prevention with email's design is fundamentally hard. Hashcash would have likely failed due to botnets and Asics; Bitcoin Lightning didn't exist until very recently.
@pete But, unfortunately, it looks like most of the people who would be motivated to make such a thing have essentially been all hired and stripped out from any remotely-related FLOSS project. Almost none of the floss projects I know from 15-20 years ago has survived.
@pete @pwuille An old-school anti-spam mechanism which is ~100% effective is to ensure that literally every contact one makes has a separate contact email others can make use of. Automatically-negotiated contact exchange to give people something similar in functionality seems possible, esp. since everyone uses mobile devices anyway.